A Pagan Heart

It seems that a 13-year-old
Muhammad visited the markets of Bostra and Damascus with his uncle.

The development of wealthy
'caravan cities' threatened the primitive egalitarianism of the Arabian
tribes.

With the creation of settled
towns new wealth was concentrated into a few hands, where previously
everyone had been at a similar economic level. Tribal loyalties were
put under
strain.

At the same time contact
with foreign cultures introduced temptations and new beliefs – causing
traditional religions to be questioned.

Into this mix of instability
and dissatisfaction an ex-caravaneer Muhammad introduced his 'revelation.'

Arabian Al-Uzza - as
fish goddess

Open
Marriage?

Both polygamy and polyandry were practised in pre-Islamic Arabia, as well as 'temporary marriage.'

Muhammad, in the rules
for his community ('umma') insisted on restricting the free-for-all
and greater care of widows and orphans – perhaps because he
was one himself.

In
later life Muhammad would take both a Coptic Christian and a Jewish
wife and – in a remarkable self-serving 'revelation' –
received special permission from God to marry not only the wife
of his
adopted son Zayd but any other woman that took his fancy.

"A
believing woman if she give herself unto the Prophet and the
Prophet desire to ask her in marriage - a privilege for thee
only, not for the other believers - We are Aware of that which
We enjoined upon them concerning their wives and those whom
their
right hands
possess - that thou mayst be free from blame, for God is ever
Forgiving,
Merciful."

(Surah 33.50)

Last
of the Great Pagan Cities

Temple of Jupiter, Baalbek (modern Lebanon) – largest and most ornate
temple in the Roman world. 6 columns remain of an original 54.

Despite Christian persecution,
Baalbek remained a centre of recalcitrant paganism into the Islamic
era.

Baalbek: Umayyad Mosque – built across the Roman forum with reused Roman
columns.

'Tell
them, My Lord has directed me to a path that is straight, a supreme
law, the creed of Abraham the upright who was not an idolater.'

(Surah 6.161)

Islam's early battle grounds

The sword was a necessary
instrument in convincing the doubtful.

Yemen

Caravans
from the south carried religious ideas as well as spices – as
verses in the Koran confirm.

The Koresh of Mecca were in perpetual
conflict with the Hawazin for control of the perfume trade. Decline
of Yemen followed the collapse of the Marib dam.

About 570 AD the kings of
Yemen, conquered by the Ethiopians of Axum, appealled to Khosrau I
(531-579) for help. He sent a fleet and an army, expelled the Ethiopians
and installed a Persian governor in the Yemen.

'And tell the
believing women ... to draw their veils over their bosoms, and
not to reveal their adornment save to their own husbands or fathers
or husbands' fathers ... And let them not stamp their feet so
as to reveal what they hide of their adornment.'

"Eschatological piety and fear of hellfire recall Syriac
monastic preaching. The role of the prophet, the significance of written
revelation, obedience of God's commands, and stress on communal
life as the context of religious fulfillment all parallel
Judaic ideas."

– Ira Lapidus (A History of Islamic Societies, p25)

For
centuries the Arabian peninsula had been entangled in the politics
of Byzantium,
Persian and Axum. Textiles and finished goods, weapons and
techniques, superstitions and ideas, all came from outside. Among
the Arabs,
tribal organisation was everything, engendering fierce loyalties
and equally fierce enmities. Like the Irish tribes of the same
period, nothing encouraged a 'national' unity or government,
there was no higher authority than the tribal sheikh.

Although the Hejaz (western
Arabia) itself was never colonised it had been affected by the
migrations of peoples and the vagaries of the caravan trade.
With the rise of maritime trade and the decline of Arabia's overland
caravan traffic, tribes that had settled in the oases either
migrated elsewhere or reverted to nomadism. The towns themselves
were
abandoned.

By the 6th
century the ancient southern and northern kingdoms of the peninsular
were well into decline, with many of their clans migrating to
the border lands of Byzantium and Persia.

Though weakened
by war and pestilence, and with their frontier provinces wrecked,
neither Persia nor Byzantium perceived the fragmented tribes
of Arabia as any threat and hired the new arrivals as 'frontier
guards' and mercenaries.

Justinian's
Legacy

Part
of the ruinous legacy of the Christian monarch Justinian (527-565)
directly favoured the rise of Islam.

The
Persian wars had disrupted the 'Silk Road' from Hamadan to Antioch
and Justinian's plan was to re-route Asian trade north
of the Caspian Sea (he sent emissaries to the Turks
of Transoxia), but the arrival of Avars from central Asia
scuttled that idea.

Justinian,
pre-occupied with the reconquest of the west, withdrew Roman
shipping from the Red Sea. To keep the trade route open he relied
upon diplomatic pressure on the Ethiopians. Unfortunately, what
remained of maritime trade was catastrophically affected by plague
rats arriving from East Africa.

War
in Mesopotamia and the decline of Red Sea shipping once again
gave a fillip to the caravan route along the Hejaz. Only one
caravan town was in a position to respond to
the opportunity: Mecca.

'The
Days of Ignorance'

Mecca, dominated
by the Koresh tribe, was the one Arabian town enjoying any sort
of prosperity in the 6th century. The sanctuary of the Kaaba,
centre of an annual pilgrimage and pan-tribal market, benefitted
from
a lively livestock and slave trade, as well as the multi-faith
shrine itself. But it was a wild 'frontier' town, rife with alcoholism,
prostitution, profiteering
and idol-worship. Muhammad
ibn Abdallah('an original and superior genius'
– Gibbon),
born into the Koresh Banu
Hashim clan,
became an affluent but disaffected urban merchant who saw virtue
in the puritanical tribal values of the desert nomads.

Though orphaned
when a boy Muhammad had the good fortune to be raised by
a grandfather who happened to be head of the ruling clan of Mecca.
As a young man he worked the caravan trade and married his employer,
a wealthy widow. Doubly blessed, Muhammad had the leisure time
to ponder the nature of the gods and plan his career.

"From his earliest
youth Mahomet was addicted to religious contemplation; each
year, during the month of Ramadan ... in a cave of Hera,
three miles
from Mecca, he consulted the spirit of fraud or enthusiasm,
whose abode is not in the heavens, but in the mind of the
prophet." – Edward Gibbon.

Periodically
entering a state of trance (wahi), probably as a consequence
of meditative experiments, Muhammad inevitably saw 'visions'
and heard 'voices'.
His devoted wife Khadeejah was there to reassure him not only
of his sanity but of a divine appointment.
The delusion was nothing less than 'final cosmic messenger' of
God himself, a conviction
enthusiastically endorsed by an entourage which included 'Salmân
the Persian', an ex-Zoroastrian, and Warraqa ibn Nawfal,
the cousin/uncle of the Muhammad's wife Khadeejah and a Christian.

Temporal lobe epilepsy?

I am advised by a practicing physician that
the trances experienced
by
Muhammad and
described
in
the
a'hadith (narrations about the life of the
Prophet) correspond to a classic case of "tonic-clonic
epilepsy with a temporal start."

Ovine
tuberculosis is a problem even today and raged unchecked
in earlier
times. This type of tuberculosis
can
be
transmitted to humans and when a human is infected
the disease travels directly to the brain where it forms
a calcified
cavity.
This
calcified
mass causes a great deal of irritation and brings on
epilepsy.

Now
the
Prophet, we are told, heard ringing in his ears, his
heart
beat rapidly, his face
turned red and his breathing laboured. Falling to
the ground, he would shake with his eyes
wide open and his lips trembling.
He would drool or sweat profusely and would sometimes
make a sound like a snoring camel. And, of course,
he
saw and heard things no one else saw or heard.

As
a victim of such convulsions there is little doubt
that Muhammad himself was convinced God (or
Gabriel) was
speaking
to him.

Centuries later the same "mystical experience"
was shared by that pastoral maid of Orleans Joan of
Arc – who
also
was raised
in close contact with sheep.

In
mid-life, this
ordinary Arab merchant assumed the mantle of cultic leader
and self-styled prophet. Not surprisingly, the wider population
of Mecca either ignored or
derided his prophetic pretensions.
Frustrated and yet fortified by the rejection, Muhammad and
some of his loyal cult members retreated to the rival town of
Yathrib (Medina). Others crossed the Red Sea to take up residence
in
the Christian
kingdom
of Axum.

In Yathrib
fierce inter-tribal warfare allowed 'Muhammad the holy man' to
take on a role of 'arbitrator.'
Emerging from the conflict as a prominent religious leader
Muhammad could now formulate serious political ambition and
a reckoning with the Meccan establishment. Combining in his own
person both religious and military
leadership he could now strike back at
the skeptics and rejectors of his prophetic status by deploying
a private army and singling
out critics for assassination or execution.

From his base
at Medina, several years of banditry
won Muhammad a
large following. For eight
years, until
630,
he raided the Meccan caravans and imposed an alms tax ('zakat') on
the tribes. Ultimately, he would plunder the pagan riches of the
shrine at Mecca.

'The
Prophet': Caesar AND Pope

Muhammad's
'Islam' was eclectic and opportunistic. The religious influences
upon 7th century Arabia were myriad. All represented a higher
civilization than Arabia's tribal society which must have distressed
the zealot.

Maintaining
that, over the course of twenty two years, he communed with an
angel, Muhammad borrowed freely from the older faiths to fashion
a monotheistic religion adapted for the tribal
society of Arabia fused with an ideology of divinely
sanctioned conquest.

In Muhammad's
day Judaism and Christianity had
been long established among the Arabs,
the Jews for centuries and in considerable numbers after the
Roman wars, and the Christians from the mid-2nd century. Missionaries
and proselytisers, they had converted whole tribes of Arabs to
their cause. As with the German tribes of Europe, faith was not
an article of individual conviction but a tribal allegiance and
by the 6th century there were Jewish tribes and Christian tribes.
In Medina, Muhammad lived among Jews and had an intimate acquaintance
with Judaism. He also either encountered or received at second
hand knowledge of diverse and heretical Christian sects.

When Muhammad
failed to convince the Jews of Medina that he was the latest
(and last) prophet he turned against them, maintaining that they
had
distorted
their own Bible. In 624 Muslim prayer mats were turned
from facing Jerusalem to facing Mecca. Two Jewish tribes were driven out
and a third decimated. The plunder helped
recruit
Bedouin
tribes
to
his cause. Eventually
Meccan resistance collapsed, particular after Muhammad enshrined
the old pagan pilgrimage to Mecca as a pillar of the new faith.

Yet for all
his successes the confederation inspired by Muhammad's charismatic
personality – he
welded together an unlikely coalition of ex-merchants, desert
nomads, and agriculturalists – did
not survive his death. Most Arabs, particularly the nomadic
and semi-nomadic Bedouin, remained at heart polytheistic pagans
and Muhammad's successor Abr Bakr (632-634) immediately had to
crush a rival alliance of tribes in eastern Arabia, and even
rival
'prophets'.

Islam has
been riven by sectarianism ever since.

Did Muhammad even exist?

Professor of Islamic theology questioned the very existence of Muhammad

Kalisch was not the first nor the only scholar to question Muhammad's existence (Professor Karl-Heinz Ohlig is another). Kalisch is no longer a Muslim.

A World
Full of Gods

Christians
and Arabia

"The
churches of Yemen. and the princes of Hira and Gassan, were instructed
in a purer creed by the Jacobite and Nestorian bishops." – Edward
Gibbon.

For
300 years the Levant had been the heartland of Christianity. But
by the
7th century the Christian Church was split into many rival factions – to
which Islam offered a refreshing simplicity.

From Edessa the 'Nestorian' (aka
the 'East Syrian Church' after the Synod of Beth
Papat, 484) successfully evangelised in the east, seducing Persia's
Lakhmid Arab mercenaries and establishing itself far into central
Asia and China.

The monophysite 'Jacobites,' much
keener on the Blessed Virgin than the Nestorians, spread north
to Armenia and south into Egypt (influencing the 'Copts').
They brought both the Ghassanid Arab mercenaries of Byzantium and
the 'Judeo-Christian' tribes of Axum into the monophysite fold.

The 'Chalcedonians,' known
variously as Maronite (after 5th century monk Maron), 'Monothelite' ('one
will in Christ' – a last minute attempt of Byzantine compromise)
and 'Melkitesite,' were an Orthodox 'royalist' minority.

The kingdom of
Abyssinia – Axum – had
a presence on the Arabian coast from the 3rd century.

In the 4th century, allied
to Rome and newly converted to Christianity, their fervour inspired
the conquest of the whole of the Himyarite
kingdom of southern Arabia. A great church 'al-Qulais' was built in San'a. The Ethiopians
campaigned as far north as central Arabia in 547.

Later ejected
by a Judaising Arab king, Dhu Nuwas of Himyar (518-525) – he
offered the inhabitants the choice between Judaism and death – the
Ethiopians re-invaded in 570 under Abraha. It was the year
of Muhammad's birth. The Ethiopians failed to take Mecca, even
with elephants, and shortly after
were driven out of the Yemen and replaced by Persians.

Ironically, it was
to safety in Ethiopia that the earliest Muslims fled when life
in Mecca looked threatening. Maybe the Axumites thought they
were Christians?

A
World Full of Gods – 7th century Arabia

Hermits
and 'Haneefs': A family affair?

In the
7th century Christian and other monotheistic ascetics
populated the deserts of Egypt, Syria and Arabia.
Muhammad appears to have been in touch with some
of them. His biographer Ibn Hisham ('Life of the
Prophet') mentions four: Warraqa bin Nawfal, Abdullâh
bin Jahsh, Uthmân bin al-Huarith and
Zaid bin Amro.

Hisham
records that when Zaid was expelled from Mecca he
went to live on Mount Hira, the same mountain to
which the Prophet himself regularly retired to meditate.
Abdullâh was Muhammad's nephew; while Warraqa
and Uthmân were sons of two aunts of his wife
Khadija.

Des.
Res. of Christian hermits

Jews
and Arabia

"In
the story of the Hebrew patriarchs the Arabs were pleased
to discover the fathers of their nation." – Edward
Gibbon.

Almost every
page of the Koran makes reference to either an episode of Hebrew
history, Jewish legends, rabbinical law, or an endorsement that
Islam is the faith of Abraham and Moses.

Jews arrived in Arabia
at least as early as the 6th century BC, lured by prospects along
the caravan routes. Ezekiel (27.19,22) catalogues trade between
Yemen and the city of Tyre.

Over the centuries
they were joined by others, fugitives from Roman-Jewish wars
and Christian purges.

The Jews of the Levant
welcomed and assisted the Persian invasion of 611-617 and when
the Byzantines returned in 629 the Jews were again expelled from
Jerusalem.

In Mecca there
were 3 Jewish clans: Beni Al Nadheer and Beni Qaynuqah expelled
in
625; and the Beni Quraidha, brutally dealt with at Khayber in
627.

Persians
and Arabia

During Greek
occupation Zoroastrian priests first fled to the deserts of Arabia.
Sassanid Persians established a presence on the Arabian shore of
the Gulf
in the
4th century AD. Among their Arab allies were the powerful Lakhmids
of northern Arabia.

The official religion
was Zoroastrianism but many exotic cults thrived, among them the
Sabians (aka Mandaeans), a Gnostic sect which flourished in southern
Babylonia.

Muhammad's converts
were at first called 'Sabians' by the Meccans. The Koran mentions
the Sabians several times (22:17; 2:59; 5:73) and also the official
priests, the Magians (22:17)

Khusro II (590-628)
made the mistake of subjugating the Lakhmids in 602. They broke
free in 611 and readily joined the Muslim cause.

India
and Arabia

From the very earliest
times the Himyar Kingdom of the Yemen received influences from
India, along with the spices.

Indian traders, both
Hindu and Buddhist, settled in some of the major sea and river
ports of the Arabian Peninsula, at the mouth of the Gulf of Aden
on the island of Socotra and at Ubla, near modern-day Basrah at
the head of the Persian Gulf.

The Tarikh-i-Tabari,
a 10th century history of Islam written in Baghdad by al-Tabari
speaks of another group of Indians present in Arabia, the Ahmaras
or 'Red-Clad People' from Sindh, probably saffron-robed Buddhist
monks.

Church
organisation, authority and membership preceded
rather than followed the justifying doctrine. As
the organisation and its needs changed so has the ‘Testament
of God’ adapted accordingly.Dogma –The
Word in all its Savage Glory